The research performed in the framework of this thesis focuses on new strategies to effectively control the growth of crystalline thin films of functional organic molecules and attributes the quest for additional growth control parameters in organic molecular beam deposition (OMBD). First the influence of light on the growth process of the sexithiophene (6T) is studied. We find that 6T thin films deposited as conventional in dark environments on KCl exhibit a bimodal growth with phase coexistence of two crystal polymorphs. In contrast, films grown under illumination with 532 nm light show increased phase purity. Further, we establish light-directed molecular self-assembly (LDSA) to generate permanently aligned thin films of tetracene (C18H12) and demonstrate direct patterning with light. Polarized light illumination leads to azimuthally photoaligned films on isotropic, amorphous substrates. Thus, LDSA can be regarded as a new degree of freedom in the quest for control-parameters in organic thin film growth. Next the impact of dynamic temperature oscillations on the time scales of molecular monolayer growth during organic molecular beam deposition is discussed. We strongly increase the island density during nucleation and selectively increase interlayer diffusion at later stages of monolayer growth. We analyse the interplay between molecular interlayer transport and island sizes to understand kinetic processes during growth. In a fourth experiment we show how thermal annealing can be used to improve smoothness and to increase the lateral size of crystalline islands of n-alkane (TTC, C44H90) films. We employ real-time optical phase contrast microscopy to track the diffusion across monomolecular step edges which causes the unusual smoothing during annealing. We rationalise the smoothing behaviour with the highly anisotropic attachment energies and low surface energies of TTC.